Daily Devotional

March 3

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)

Why does God... Why doesn't He...?

Let us follow [Habakkuk] as he applies this method* to the two major problems that troubled him....

(a) God is eternal. After stating his difficulty the prophet declares, "Art thou not from everlasting?" (1:12). You see, he is laying down a proposition. He is forgetting for a moment the immediate problem and asking himself what it was he was sure of about God....

He had just said (1:11) that the Chal­deans, flushed with success, imputed their power to their god; and ... he began to think, "Their god—what is their god? Just something they have made themselves (cf. Isaiah 46). God ... the everlasting God ... is not like the gods whom men worship.... He is God from eternity to eternity.... He has preceded history. He has created history. His throne is above the world and outside time. He reigns in eternity, the everlasting God."

(b) God is self-existent ... the eternal I AM.... The name "I AM that I AM" means, "I am the Absolute, the self-existent One." Here is a second vital principle. God is not in any sense dependent upon anything that happens in the world.... Not only is He not dependent upon the world, but He need never have created it had He not willed to do so.

The tremendous truth concerning the Trinity is that an eternally self-existent life resides in the Godhead—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Here again is wonderful reassurance.... The problem begins to fade.

(c) God is holy ... utterly, absolutely righteous and holy, "a consuming fire." "God is light and in him is no darkness at all." And the moment you consider Scriptures like that, you are forced to ask, "Can the Lord of the earth do that which is unrighteous?" Such a thing is unthinkable.

(d) God is almighty.... The God who created the whole world out of nothing, who said, "Let there be light" and there was light, has absolute power; He has illimitable might. He is "The Rock."